As concern over the environmental quality of the world's oceans continues to grow, environmentalists' attention is increasingly focusing on the widespread practice within the maritime industry of dumping polluted bilge water overboard. While many countries attempt to protect against such practices by the threat of criminal penalties and fines amounting to millions of dollars, such deterrence measures are difficult to enforce and are often easily avoided by operators who travel in and out of regulated waters. Unfortunately, pumping polluted water overboard is simpler and less expensive than either cleaning the water prior to pumping overboard or holding the polluted water until arriving in port where it can be pumped to a land based water treatment facility. As a result, pumping the polluted water overboard in unprotected waters is a daily occurrence accounting for millions of gallons of polluted water being dumped into the world's oceans every year. Many land based operations also produce polluted aqueous mixtures that can have a negative environmental impact. Like the bilge water that accumulates within a ship's hull, these land based operations often produce large quantities of water contaminated with oil, fuel, and other hydrocarbon based waste.
Physical separation systems exist which can treat the water at varying levels of effectiveness and efficiency. For example, API separators, inclined separators, and weir separators can all be used to separate out some of the oils and other immiscible liquids in a supply of contaminated water. However, these systems cannot effectively remove the finer droplets of oils nor oils having a relatively neutral buoyancy. Consequently, these systems are not suitable for shipboard use since they do not produce treated water that is sufficiently clean to return to the ocean. While finer filtration elements or chemical treatments can be used to handle the smaller oil droplets, such added components can be expensive and more labor intensive to maintain. Accordingly, there exists a need for a system that can be used to decontaminate polluted water in a manner which reduces or eliminates the incentive for operators to simply dump the polluted water into the environment. Also, apart from the treatment of contaminated water, there exists a need more generally for a system that can separate any immiscible liquids (i.e., two or more liquids that do not form a homogeneous solution when mixed).